Sunday, April 15, 2012

Headlines - Sunday April 15

According to a report form Roll Call, Speaker Boehner is planning to attach the Keystone XL pipeline to the next 90-day extension of the transportation funding bill.

They'll never stop fucking that chicken.

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Dick quote of the day

"I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there's no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." You don't have it dumped in your lap." Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Crazy Caucus) on student loans

Yeah, when Foxx went to college, it was way easier to pay your own way. I couldn't find tuition rates for UNC, Foxx's alma mater, for the years she attended. But, by way of another example, in-state tuition at University of Georgia in 1960 was around $195 per semester — or $ 1,355 in 2012 money. Today, the actual tuition is $4,964. Four times higher, adjusted for inflation. And that doesn't include housing, food, books and other fees. Paying your own way while achieving any sort of academic success is nearly impossible.

Here's a story which covers Mittens' NRA speech. In that speech, Mittens regurgitated the NRA's own paranoid fantasy about Obama, which goes something like this: Obama does fuck-all about guns for four years as part of a fiendishly clever scheme to lull gun owners into a false sense of security and win a second term. And then, just as quick as his hand leaves the bible on his Second Inauguration Day, Obama orders jack-booted ATF agents to go door-to-door to forcibly disarm the populace.

Of course, Mittens himself was all for sensible gun control measures when he was running for and serving as governor of Massachusetts, and unlike the president, Mittens has actually signed gun control legislation. If the NRA were a bipartisan interest group, it would support the president over Romney for that reason.

But the NRA is actually a dismal, dishonest collection of Republican hacks and barrel-stroking, pinwheel-eyed lunatics who believe open-carry permits are required to protect them from rogue turkeys, so it's entirely in the bag for Gun-Grabber Willard.

As for Mittens himself, who the hell knows what he really believes on the gun issue. He believes he should be president, and he believes there's no lie too shameless to utter in pursuit of that goal. And his lies will be swallowed, digested and excreted as truth by fellow liars and hacks like Drudge, and the resulting turds will be polished to a high gloss by bottom-feeders like Halperin.

Some claim their choices affect no one else, in reality,flesh eating affects everyone.

Rainforest Eating meat contributes to the destruction of rainforests, often called the "lungs of our planet" more than 1,000 plant and animal species that live there become extinct. An estimated 80% of annual world deforestation is related to animal agriculture. While some Amazon rainforest in Brazil is also being cut down for soy fields, much of this (genetically modified) soy is being fed to animals being raised for meat – an even more inefficient and wasteful use of essential and irreplaceable rainforest. The meat production-and-consumption cycle is essentially transforming the world's precious and mega-biodiverse tropical rainforests into carbon dioxide and cholesterol, thereby increasing disasters on both the personal and planetary levels.

Global Warming: Eating meat increases global warming, one of the most dangerous threats to our planet, at least according to reports by and for Greenpeace, Oxfam, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Pentagon, the World Bank, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and a vast number of other scientists, political economic analysts, and environmentalists — and there are no scientific or environmental organizations or any peer-reviewed scientific or environmental articles that dispute global warming and that humans are causing and contributing to it.

Fossil Fuels: Eating meat increases our dependence on non-renewable, heavily-polluting fossil fuels, including oil. With the onset of "peak oil", this is an increasingly important issue. Producing a single pound (0.45 kg) of beef requires burning up to 40 times more fossil fuels than to produce one pound (0.45 kg) of soybeans. For example, it requires approximately 78 calories of non-renewable fossil fuel for each calorie of protein obtained from factory-farmed beef, but only 2 calories of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of protein from soybeans.

Land: Eating meat takes land away from more productive purposes. Almost 1/2 of U.S. land is used to raise animals for food or for crops to feed these animals. From a third to a half of the world's grain, and about three-quarters of major crops in the U.S. (e.g., corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, alfalfa), is fed to animals destined for slaughter, while about one billion poor people chronically suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and its debilitating effects, tens of thousands of them consequently dying each day, one every few seconds, and millions of affluent people die from the ill affects of over-eating and over-consumption, primarily of animal products.

Water: Water is an absolutely essential resource. Eating meat wastes huge amounts of water, increasingly referred to as "blue gold". A typical meat-based diet wastes a tremendous amount of water per person every day, he amount of water used to produce the meat from a single cow is enough to float a large ship. More than half of the water consumed in the U.S. irrigates land to grow feed for livestock. The Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the Great Plains of the U.S. and one of the world's largest stores of fresh groundwater, took millions of years to create and is being depleted (and polluted) in decades due to the livestock industry and the crops needed to feed it. It takes about 100 times the amount of water to produce beef as it does to produce wheat.

Fish & Other Sea Animals: "Seafood is simply a socially acceptable form of bush meat", according to Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. "We condemn Africans for hunting monkeys and mammalian and bird species from the jungle, yet the developed world thinks nothing of hauling in magnificent wild creatures like swordfish, tuna, halibut, shark and salmon for our meals. The fact is that the global slaughter of marine wildlife is simply the largest massacre of wildlife on the planet."

Economics & Externalities: Our economic system doesn't value animals or the environment—unless they're consumed and money is exchanged. Meat-based illnesses cost the U.S. tens of billions of dollars in additional health care costs, and even more in lost productivity and the depletion of the Earth's natural capital. The meat industry is exceptionally costly, wasteful, inefficient, unfair, destructive, and regressive, while vegetarianism is environmentally and economically sustainable and socially progressive. The world—and all its inhabitants—can't afford meat and the bloated livestock industry.